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Now, it’s no secret that the Wii U hasn’t been the most successful of consoles since its launch. After some rather promising sales in the launch period, the Wii U became rather stagnant and has been climbing out of its own grave ever since. Now that the PS4 and Xbox One have been released, next-gen is truly upon us, but for all of its shortcomings, here are the reasons I believe that the Wii U is still the best option for those looking to jump in to the future of gaming. Continue reading →

Since Telltale Games re-invented the point and click adventure with The Walking Dead, many have praised their unique ideas and since then, they’ve become rather busy. Currently developing Tales From The Borderlands, a new Game of Thrones game, as well as continuing to release new episodes for The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead: Season 2, it’s fair to say that they have become a rather popular studio of late.

Now, as much as I loved The Walking Dead, a couple of things have frustrated me about the way Telltale make these wonderful games. I’d love to state for the sake of the article that I disliked their games, I don’t, in fact The Walking Dead made me care about it’s characters more than most games ever have, and because of this it’s one of my favourite games of last-gen, but maybe with these changes, Telltale could make a game I like even more. Continue reading →

With a new year, comes a new beginning, and the knights have returned from their adventures to bring you another slice or two of the gaming world. So I decided to celebrate our revival by taking you back through the wondrous highs and the tragic lows, of what turned out to be possibly the most interesting console generation this incredible industry has ever pulled out of its dark, wire infested hat.

Now I can already tell from the title alone that people are simply going to rush straight to the comments and bitch. For those people, learn to bleeding read before you do that, seriously. Jeez. How do you function in the real world with impulse control that poor. How do you have time to comment on things on the internet when you should by all rights be lying half dead on your bathroom floor with a gullet full of shiny things you just had to touch.

Video games get a lot of flak for being a soft form of entertainment, for them providing very little in the way of educational content or even stuff that makes you think of anything more than “Hmmm, I wonder how many flashbangs I could throw at that terrorist before he literally collapsed of a mechanically induced seizure”. Characters from video games also get criticised for being impossibly unrealistic representations of the human form or for being huge dicks, so to combat that, here are 4 quotes that show that some video game characters are pretty damn smart.

I freaking love Albert Wesker, he is, bar nothing, one of my favourite characters from any video game ever made. I have quotes from him committed to memory and I have the Umbrella logo tattooed on my own body, though the latter is mostly to fuck with people after I die. He can punch clear through a mans chest and can kung-fu his way out of a zombie holocaust. In short, he’s the man. Well he would be if he took off those damn glasses.

I’ve blocked the person’s identity because it’s unimportant, what is important is the fact prior to this point I wasn’t really aware of the concept of a “fake gamer girl” I’d heard the phrase fake geek girl before, but Luke McKinney already sucker punched those fuckers so hard they’re still shitting diamonds, however since this is the Knights of Gaming, I figured someone needed to address this topic and explain why people like the person above are total fucking morons.

It seemed to me like most of the hostility towards these fake gamer girls stemmed from the fact they claimed to be gamers, while only having a casual knowledge of the entire scene in general and that they only latched onto gaming because it’s popular and cool. Now at the age of 22 I never thought I’d say this, but the person quoted above is 16 and I noticed that this trend is prevalent among guys that age, but back in my day (jesus I feel old), games weren’t fucking cool. Gaming today is a completely acceptable social endeavour that attractive women will openly associate themselves with, if you’re complaining about that, fuck you, I would have killed for that shit when I was 16.

But okay, maybe the hostility stems from the fact that they have an offensively limited view of gaming which I could accept they’re not a real gamer because they only play Pokemon, they never played Final Fantasy 7 or Wind Waker. But wait, you’re not a real gamer because you never played the original Final Fantasy. Well, you’re not a real gamer because you never played the original Japanese version on an imported console. Nuh uh, you’re not a real gamer because you never played Pac-Man in an arcade.

See how stupid that looks? When your argument is “this person doesn’t know as much as me, therefore they’re not allowed to be a part of my subculture” you’re just starting a dick measuring contest and take it from a guy named Smallwood, there will always be a bigger dick out there. Trying to say someone isn’t a real gamer by stating that they’ve not played the same games as you is like calling someone gay because they haven’t fucked your girlfriend. What makes the games you’ve played anymore legitimate than the ones they have?

If I was a real gamer I’d have based this on Final Fantasy 6.

But okay, maybe it’s nothing to do with dick measuring, maybe it’s all down to the fact they’re not a real fan, they don’t understand the culture and it’s subtleties, all they did was buy a t-shirt and a copy of Pokemon. Well, they still bought a copy of Pokemon, right? If you ran a charity and person came up to give you money would you berate and hassle them about whether they understood exactly what your charity stood for before you took it? No, because you’d have a fist shaped hole in the face part of your soul before you got half way through that conversation. You’d take their money and politely thank them for supporting something you believe in. Now replace the word charity with gaming.

Just because someone doesn’t understand exactly what gaming is about, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re still supporting it with their money and time. We need the casual crowd, if you think something can survive purely off of the back of its die-hard fans and enthusiasts, go try to buy a Mega Man game.

But maybe you dislike fake gamer girls because they’re only, as aforementioned, latching onto gaming because it’s popular, well that’s just a necessary part of something being popular. Every subculture and group interest has them, they’re called posuers and they’re not a new thing. Skateboarders have to put up with people using a skateboard as a fashion accessory, punk fans have to deal with people wearing an anarchy badge without understanding it and hip hop fans have to deal with Dr Dre fans. The fact gaming even has posuers at all only means that it has been legitimised as a subculture and if you’re truly a fan of gaming, you’d like that because it means gaming is now something people want to associate themselves with. Those people being attractive women is just the icing on a cake made of explosions and polygons.

However, I couldn’t discuss this topic without touching on the misogyny, the beautiful, beautiful misogyny. The fact that this term is applied exclusively to girls while there are hundreds if not thousands of guys out there who do exactly the same thing, guys who only play FIFA or COD and claim to be gamers, no one insults them. Which is where someone says “guys don’t upload pictures of themselves with an Xbox controller saying “lol, such a nerd XD!”” which is an excellent point. But guys also don’t have to deal with threats of rape every time they log on, their mothers do, but that’s a different story, so I personally give girls a pass on that one. But others don’t, others think these women should be able to name the lead character from every Final Fantasy as well as detail the timeline of Zelda because they call themselves a gamer. The fact that you need to do anything other than play games to prove you’re a gamer is a sentence so innately fucking stupid this paragraph is now required teaching material in the state of Texas.

If you play games, you are a gamer. Every person you accuse of being a fake gamer, still bought a console and supported the industry, you should be thankful for that.

So, with a great year of gaming behind us, there are plenty of games getting attention, awards for best this and that are being thrown around like nobodys business, so we here at TKOG thought that we’d join in and give you a little list of some of our favourite games of the year (GOTY). Continue reading →

Update: I’ve written a small piece in response to the feedback I’ve been given today, it can be found here.

Yesterday I published this article about why I personally think that fighting games are bad for gaming in general, due to the fact I feel that people from the fighting game scene or community are quick to insult new or casual players, written from the perspective of a casual player. The reaction was immediate and swift, people were quick to start insulting me for just being a casual observer of the scene. Which was so ironically beautiful, Alanis Morissette songs started playing on my laptop as soon as I scrolled down to the comments.Continue reading →

So, yesterday I read an article about why zelda should be handed over to Retro Studios, and well, it got me thinking about what I want to see from Zelda games in the future. I’m personally a massive Zelda fan, it is my favourite gaming series of all time and as much as people may moan about it being stale, I think that Skyward Sword was one of the finest Zelda games to date. However, I understand why some people are beginning to find it boring, the last few games in the series have clearly suffered from the near perfect formula which the games have stood by for years. Not to say that the formula is a bad one, it’s just that us as gamers are so used to it now that we want more, we want that feeling of awe that we got from Zelda all those times in the past. So hopefully, here are some ways that Nintendo can freshen up Zelda for us all to love for another 25 years. Continue reading →